Tag: technomics

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence — but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

In his recent post on modernity and myth, Vince Garton notes Sorel’s interest – in sharp distinction to the majority of Marxist currents of his day (or today, for that matter) – in small-scale, workshop-based production. Vince writes:

Against the mainstream of Marxism—and against later theorists such as Schumpeter who would decisively identify the trajectory of capitalism with indefinite industrial concentration—Sorel’s vision of the far future self-abolition of capitalism was one of distribution, the internal development of workshop organisation; we may say, in the tradition of Catholic social thought, subsidiarity.

Edit: If communism is to be based, as Xenogoth suggests, on otherness and differentiation, then a neo-Sorelian perspective on industrial disintermediation – and the question of ethics that are tangled up in this complex – is of immediate interest. After all, such processes constitute the fragmentation of the current industrial order, which on the one hand opens up escape routes from the present through the increased ability to produce independently, while on the other hand it poses hard questions fully-automated, luxurious Walmart Socialism advocated by so many on the radical left.

While accelerationist discourse (at least that outside of the explicitly left variety) often seems to skip around the issue of climate change, the overlap of catastrophic ecological transitions with technomic take-off and socio-cultural mutation is enshrined in Plant and Land’s “Cyberpositive”. In this ur-text, global warming, feminization, the growth of drug trade networks, out of control computer systems, and schizo-culture run together as the entangling fall-out of self-organization kicking into overdrive. The end is near and it is hot (both in the sense of temperature and allure):

Replacing the cold war’s phallic stand off is the war on drugs, dissolutio into the jungle, the world’s states united in their terminal self-destructin strategy of prohibition. No more dreams of a nuclear winter. The 1990 begins the China Syndrome of capitalism.

Ice is crystallized speed. It is also Gibson’s name for dataprotection Intruder Countermeasure Electronics. Ice patrols the boundaries, freezes the gates, but the aliens are already amongst us. Convergent input is interpreted by security as intelligent intrusion, as a trap or conspiracy, with everything preprogrammed to connect. Doubting that women belonged to humanity, Burroughs imagined them to be extraterrestrial invaders. Viruses are like this too. Nobody knows where they come from. They always arrive from elsewhere, perhaps even outer space. Humanity is an allergic reaction to vulnerability, but allergy depends upon the health of the immune system: the ice has to work.

Tactics are subtlety, or intelligence. As things become more complex they become more female, but patriarchy prolongs the ice age of mankind. The fatherland is cryogenic, a fantasy of perfect preservation, whose bronze age ancestors are even now thawing out in the Alps, frozen assets under attack. Global warming melts the ice, raises the seas, subverts the glaciers. Computer viruses melt icebergs of data down the screens, burning through the bacterial frost, like Burroughs exploring his junkie cold with LSD.

Trending towards a similar space, through from a totally different beginning position, is Kevin Carson’s Tuckerite market socialism. In a 2013 blog post for the P2P Foundation, Carson took up Greer’s theory of catabolic collapse – which admittedly has more to do with vast resource depletion than just climate change – and twisted it by suggesting that what was being traced was the decay of the old technological superstructures, right as a new technologies and infrastructures burst forth from the ruin (Greer, as one might expect, took issue with the bent of Carson’s argument, which led to a lengthy and productive exchange. Ya’ll can check out the twists and turns here, here, here, and here).

What’s interesting about Carson’s argument is that it exhibits distinct parallels with the apocalyptic vision sketched out by Plant and Land, albeit in a very different register. Just “Cyberpositive” details the escape of self-organizing technomic processes and mutagenic cultural viruses from the restraints imposed by the Human Security System, Carson sees in the emergent economy a “singularity”, the launch of a stigmergic network economy that is much faster and more agile to the top-heavy corporate capitalism that will inevitability fight back against it. As he wrote in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:

Localized, small-scale economies are the rats nest in the dinosaurs’ nests. The informal and household economy operates more efficiently than the capitalist economy, and can function on the waste byproducts of capitalism. It is resilient and replicates virally. In an environment in which resources for technological development have been almost entirely diverted toward corporate capitalism, it takes technologies that were developed to serve corporate capitalism, adapts them to small-scale construction, and uses them to destroy corporate capitalism… there are two economies competing: their old economy of bureaucracy, high overhead, and enormous capital outlays, and cost-plus markup, and our new economy of agility and low overhead. And in the end… we will bury them.

While agreeing with the overall dynamic being traced here, there are a few quibbles with this picture to be had from an [unconditional] accelerationist ground, but we’ll have to defer those to a future post. What’s of interest here is the idea that there is an intersection between a self-organizing, runaway auto-revolution in the development of technomic forces, and the self-organizing, runaway processes that underpin ecological systems and natural resources. The zone of this intersection is plugged into the question of decay and growth as operational cycles in the context of an uneven, combined, and accelerating world system, which is ensemble that serves as the heart of this blog (see Ruin and Freedom, Anarchy, and Wash Out for more on this particular theme). It’s an edge-of-the-edge kind of zone that hopefully we can explore more fully in the coming weeks and months: after all, those who don’t consider the annihilation of the neo-ancien regime in the technomic spiral’s compression chamber as imminent are likely delusional; likewise, those who don’t see this unfolding against a backdrop of socio-ecological ruination – coastal cities swallowed by angry seas, walls of fire devouring midwestern ‘burgs, super-hot asphalt running like water through empty streets, devastating geopolitical conflicts over resources and trade routes, on and on – have their heads buried in the sand.

This looks like a whole lot of ruin and not much freedom. Indeed, the U/ACC argument has already sought to assign the whole question to the trashcan in advance (hence the imperatives of “let go” and “do what thou wilt”), and on a (very shortened) timescale the duration of human existence implodes. But in the timespace between now and then, the swirling drift of development is what interests us: what trendlines already in play will advance into dominance? How will reactions to the great Lemurian insurgency unfold, and how will the fall-out frame necessary organizational infrastructures?

We can expect a greater proliferation of so-called resilient communities – bottom-up, networked forms of community that emerge despite the activities of top-down power systems (regardless of whether or not those activities are slated to encourage or discourage their growth). As Jon Robb describes, the “core process” of the resilient community is based on three elements that conform closely to Carson’s own analysis:

Resilience to rapidly propagating global shocks (an inevitable outcome of a global system that is too large, fast, and complex to control).

High productive in their ability to produce everything from food to products to energy (they produce wealth). Networked innovation.

Extremely efficient and low cost. This stems from: shorter distances, less energy, less space, less time, less mass, and less information (as in, less management overhead required).

The emergent trends that allow these sorts of ‘micro-level’ processes to kick into overdrive include “everything from high intensity small impact farming to personal fabrication to DIY synthetic biology to global tinkering networks to high efficiency local energy production”. The relationship between these things and the primary process should be clear. As more efficient, network-based, technological-bleeding-edge-type forces, they represent the output of the acephalic, market-driven drive towards optimization – modernity in its thrasher mode. Thus while one might hear the words “resilient community” and mutter f o l k p o l i t i c s under their breath, there is no true distinction between this drift and Leigh Phillips’ defense of modernization, growth, and industrialization as a response to the dread of eco-doom in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse Porn Addicts (at least after the universalist left pretenses have been ejected and some sense of abstract doom is reinstalled).

Flipping the script a little bit: there is no time like the present to reread Alejandro de Acosta’s brilliant encounter between the anonymously-penned green anarcho-nihilist text Desertand Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet:

They should be read together; the thought that is possible in that stereoscopic reading is what my or intends. (I mean to gesture towards the passage from one perspective to the other, and perhaps back.) If Desert sets out from the knowability of the world—as the object of science, principally—it has the rare merit of spelling out its increasing unknowability as an object for our political projects, our predictions and plans. Dust of this Planet allows us to push this thought father in an eminently troubling direction, revealing a wilderness more wild than the wild nature invoked by the critics of capitalism and civilization: the unthinkable Planet behind the inhabitable Earth. As we slip in this direction (which is also past the point of distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary), all our positions, those little compressed bundles of opinion and analysis, practice and experience, crumble—as positions. No doubt many will find this disconcerting. But something of what we tried to do by thinking up, debating, adopting and abandoning, positions, is left—something lives on, survives—maybe just the primal thrust that begins with a question or profound need and collapses in a profession of faith or identity. That would be the path back to the perspective of Desert (now irreparably transformed). What is left, the afterlife of our first outward movements, might be something for each to witness alone, in a solitude far from the gregarious comfort of recognizable positions, of politics. To say nothing of community.